Mary Webb was born Mary Gladys Meredith on March 25th 1881 at Leighton Lodge, Leighton, a village south of Shrewsbury, near The Wrekin. He is a good man, a hard-worker, but his obsession for money, the precious bane, takes all precedence in his life, and as we often see in our own time, the blind pursuit of money often loses us our chances of happiness. Although she believes she won’t ever know the bonds of love, Prue falls for the weaver, Kester Woodseaves. There are misfortunes that make you spring up and rush to save yourself, but there are others that are too bad for this, for they leave nought to do.

Precious Bane by Mary Webb | Waterstones

The prose immerses one in the countryside and gives one a feel for the archaic dialect unique to this area. Internet Archive's in-browser audio with external links "theater" requires JavaScript to be enabled. Though her work wasn't widely distributed until after her death, once the reading public discovered it, her novels became best sellers by the 1930s; and though they've been forgotten again by those mainly interested in novelty, they continue to be much reprinted for the delight of discerning readers.speaks of listening to the "reminiscence" of S

Precious Bane by Mary Webb | Goodreads

For all its profundity and mysticism, this is a novel that will satisfy lovers of unabashed romance, with scenes that, updated, would not be out of place in a modern romantic comedy (fans of the lakeside firefly scene in Disney’s Robin Hood may be particularly gratified). The only cause for all the misfortune that they could see was the curse of God … They’d reasoned it out slow, as we do in the country, but once they came to the end of the reasoning they were fixed, and it would take a deal to turn them.Not only had he looked at me, but he had looked with favour and longing, and though I knew it was only because the truth was hidden from him, yet I was glad of what I had, as a winter bird is, that will come to your hand for a little crumb, though in plenteous times she would but mock you from the topmost bough. I’m descended from farmers on both sides of my family, and although I’ve never experienced the toil of that life, it always resonates when I read about it.

Mary Webb: The woman whose Shropshire-inspired novels are Mary Webb: The woman whose Shropshire-inspired novels are

Precious Bane is also the story of Gideon, Prue's doomed brother, equally strong-willed, but with other motives. But mostly, it's because of her warm embrace of life, her caring heart for her fellow humans, and her delight in the sheer beauty of the natural world (richly described here in all of its glory, at a time before industrial pollution and urban sprawl menaced and defiled it; Webb clearly shared her protagonist's delight in it). While the story is as dramatic, and tragic, as any of Thomas Hardy’s, our narrator, Prue Sarn, is also our enthusiastic guide to what she imagines must be an alien world. At the age of twenty one, Mary was writing essays and poems with nature as the main theme (published in 1917 as The Spring of Joy).A brother and sister entirely different: one all darkness, the other all brightness; one consumed by the lightning inside and the other emanating warmth; one ruthlessly desiring more whilst the other knows the value of her little piece of here and now. A profound experience of sweetness is avowedly “not religious, like the goodness of a text heard at a preaching”, but bound up in the natural world, part and parcel of “such things as bird-song and daffodowndillies rustling”. It’s all particularly touching because Prue, with her harelip, “the barn-door savage of Sarn”, is advised, and believes at first, that “an ’usband and a cot of rushes” are not for her.